[Laughs] I have no idea what I'm doing.
[typing]
[soft jazz music]
Greetings and welcome to "LGR Oddware"
where we're taking a look at hardware and software
that is odd, forgotten and obsolete,
like CRT displays,
although you might argue that they're not so obsolete because
there's a lot of people that still use them, especially retro gamers
for, you know, the lack of lag and
the really deep color depth and even the real
sharp clarity that you get with RGB and things like that.
Well, what if
I told you that you could get rid of all that good stuff
and play your modern games on a half-inch CRT?
So you might be thinking to yourself,
"Why?! What's the point?"
Well, there is no point!
And that's the point.
It's because you can!
And yes, the astute among you may be realizing by now that this is actually
a viewfinder from an old camcorder.
VHS camcorders would come with these viewfinders back in the day.
They had *little* tiny CRTs in there, anywhere from a half-inch
to, like, two inches or so.
Some of 'em were in color. This one is in black and white.
Unlike most of the things I cover on Oddware, this is
not a commercial product. This was never exactly sold anywhere,
in this form, at least.
This is a project put together by a viewer of mine
who sent this to me, named Brad Sparks.
He has a YouTube channel called xeroxcape.
Go check it out if you'd like.
He's got some interesting projects going on there as well.
But yes, thank you very much, sir.
I was hugely thankful to get this thing because I actually saw
an article on Instructables about how to do this myself,
but I was lamenting on Twitter that I-- I don't have the, you know, time to do it, but
Brad was like, "Hey, here you go!"
For all intents and purposes, this is just your normal NTSC
black and white CRT, and
this has been modified to include a composite signal input
which means that you can plug in pretty much anything
as long as it doesn't go past 480p or a 480i kind of signal.
There's some variance there that you can mess with but
anything beyond that typically doesn't really work very well.
Of course, if we're gonna be using a PlayStation 4 with this,
that's not gonna work because a PS4 outputs with HDMI,
so I went to Radio Shack and, yes, there's still a Radio Shack near me.
I got one of these cheap little adapters.
This lets you convert HDMI over to a composite signal,
as long as
the HDMI signal is, again, like 480p,
and you have to put your PlayStation 4 into Safe Mode, but it does work.
As you might have noticed earlier, this does have a USB cable,
which is for powering the CRT.
So, you just plug it into anything with USB power.
I'm using one of these little self-contained power bank battery deals.
And once it's powered on, it will show whatever's plugged into the composite signal.
And in this case,
it is the PlayStation 4 through that HDMI adapter, and look! You can--
uh...
almost see what's going on...
Actually, no, you can't. You can't read a thing.
Not all is lost because thankfully
I have some macro lens solutions and whatnot
with my DSLR, and this how I ended up [laughs]
playing games on this.
And, of course, I'm going to be showing it off just a little bit more.
And, yeah, I know it sort of negates the
whole purpose of having a really tiny display, but trust me,
after about five seconds, you get eye strain. So, screw it!
Let's just take a look at some Rocket League here.
And as you might expect, I am doing absolutely terribly,
because, you know, I can't see anything. [Laughs]
Even looking through the camera viewfinder and zoomed in and everything,
it's just too tiny and
there's a lot of overscan going on with this and
that's just to be expected. This is the tiniest little CRT I've ever seen.
So... [laughs]
It doesn't matter.
This is purely because I think this is fun.
My apologies to my teammates, whoever I was playing with.
Um... I was effectively useless, just dicking around.
I am probably the only person to have played Rocket League this way, so that's something.
Checking out the YouTube app on PS4 and
"LGR Thrifts" here, the most recent episode showing. [Laughs]
I just wanted to this because there's me inside of a Hot Wheels monitor
inside of this video on this app
through a one-half inch CRT zoomed in with my camera.
It-- It's just the most complicated way I can imagine
to, to watch any YouTube video ever,
and that's why I did it.
With the HDMI input, you can, of course,
plug in your modern PC, which I went ahead and did here.
Navigated on over to Twitter and
tweeted out a tweet
saying that I was tweeting on a half-inch CRT.
And people were like, "What? Why?"
Since I got the PC plugged in and ready, I tried out some Fallout 4.
And you know what? This makes a whole lot of sense to me in my mind.
to be playing something like this
retro, futuristic, post-apocalypse thing on this tiny, little, crappy
black and white tube.
It just makes sense.
Even though, once again, there's some weird display problems.
Over to the right, it was showing part of my background.
I did have my computer set up to be in 640x480,
and it worked for some things. Didn't work for Fallout 4.
Hee hee, whatever. That's kind of to be expected.
You're never supposed to do this.
And I died.
And, uh, that makes perfect sense because, again, couldn't see what I was doing.
[Duke voice] "But now, it's time to
play DOS games on a half-inch CRT
and chew bubble gum.
And I'm all outta gum."
With Duke Nukem 3D
playing through the half-inch CRT.
And look, you know what?
Th-- this actually was the most playable thing that I did.
Probably because that I have played this SO MUCH
that I can do it just about by sound [chuckles] at this point, and
there's a little bit of a lag, I guess
introduced maybe from the adapter?
Uh, that's a little... little disappointing.
I didn't notice any lag at all when it was plugged in directly through the
composite signal itself, but that's fine.
That's all for this episode of Oddware on the half-inch CRT
I would love to try out a larger one sometime, perhaps in color.
There were, uh, you know color versions of these in much later camcorders and such.
But you know what?
This, this'll do for now.
I love playing around with this thing because
it's so useless! [Laughs] There's no practical reason to have this
whatsoever, except that it's a fun little novelty, and uh...
You know, it's sort of conversation piece, too. I'll just be like,
"Hey, look! You can play your games on this thing!"
And, and everybody's like, "Who cares?"
But I know a few of you guys enjoyed this, right?
But, no, seriously. If you *did* enjoy this, then perhaps you'd like to see some of my others.
Here are some Oddware episodes of the past linked too.
And of course, there's a whole lot more on my channel with more coming every Monday and Friday.
So subscribe if you'd like, or not. That's cool.
And as always, thank you very much for watching.